Abstract nominee

I always have at least one camera with me at all times, and now that I have a toddler most of my images are made between work and home. Because I work across the street from the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology— which contains the Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, among other things — I come across the building several times a day. It’s an easy building to shoot in that it lends itself to photography, and I’m constantly bumping into people taking a photo of it. However, it’s difficult to make a unique image of the building that stands out from the plethora of photos online.

Neuroscientists play an integral part in culture but the public knows little about how science is done, who does it or why it’s important. One consequence of opaque scientific work is the inability to see which individuals are conducting their research, their personal stories, and their motivations to help reveal the complexity of the nature we are imbued by.

These images were captured with a compact large format camera using experimental New55 PN instant film. The opaqueness of the positive (left) represents the raw data collected by scientists on their quest to understand nature. The inverted negative (right) represents how scientists reveal nature through filtering data, beautifying imagery, and at times removing unwanted, but captured information.

All scientists are part of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.